Why are some men so guarded from saying "I love you?" You may be the type of person who is free with your “I love you's”. You say it to a friend after meeting them for a coffee or to your cousin every time you hang up the phone with her. Alternatively, you may be the type of person who is very selective with your “I love you’s” - you reserve them for just the right time in a romantic setting or only for your mother on Mother’s Day and even then it is only in a card. You may find you are somewhere in between the two.

Whichever type you are, both men and women have their own personal reasons for using or avoiding these 3 words in their everyday lives.

Speaking specifically about relationships and dating though, there is often a lot of pressure for a woman to hear “I love you” from a man. It’s often not intentional pressure but a woman tends to determine exactly where she stands and where this relationship is going based solely on these three words.

It is not the same for men. They do not have the same relationship with the words “I Love You” as women do. In a recent Pax workshop, a woman posed the question “Why can’t they just say ‘I Love You’?” A man replied, “Because it means more than that.” When a man is in love, it is very intense for him. Encapsulating these feelings into 3 simple, basic words doesn’t really make sense to him. It can almost be insulting to him because the depth of his feelings are much deeper than three words.

Sometimes the conversation can go like this:

Woman: “How do you feel about me?”

Man: pause, thinking, pause, maybe the first time he has considered it, pause, thinking

Woman: (in her head thinking about all the good or bad things that could come out of his mouth at this very moment and it seems like an eternity)

Man: “I care about you.”

Woman: "What the heck?! You CARE about me? What does that mean?!! I think we should end this right now because you obviously don’t feel the same way."

Man: Speechless and mystified.

You see “I care about you” to a man has the same weight as “I love you” does for a woman. The problem is when a woman is breaking up with a man, she will often say “I care about you BUT……” and usually it's followed with some bs line. This is why when sometimes when a woman hears “I care about you” from a man, she’ll immediately question if it’s bs.

When men were asked in the workshop what “I care about you” means when they say it, the men had these responses:

“It means you are the centre of my world.” “It means everything I do, I do for you.” “It means I would do anything for you, including die for you.”

I would say that sounds a lot like the feelings behind the words “I love you”, wouldn’t you?